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If any of you out there finds the true meaning of Melencolia I then the lid of the coffin will rise and the bell, which is attached to the lid and held on one side by a cord, will ring. But time is running out: The life (?) inside is in the balance (the hourglass and the balance are attached to the base of the coffin and not the lid). Poor Angel, so distraught, can’t find the solution, not even with all the known implements of the time, the keys, and a purse full of doubloons. Oh yes, judging by the shadows, the sun is yet too high for a natural rainbow. Carry on; I enjoy all your explanations and elucidations. Forget this prattle. I’ll keep listening for the bell.
[Reply]
- Do not make the confusion between Hitler and Dürer! For Dürer the sun is not a positive symbol at all. As a specialist of the Revelation of Saint John, A. Dürer portrayed here Lucifer, the fallen Angel, beautiful and luminous. If not, how could he seduce? In the European Renaissance culture ‘melancolia’ indicates a Satanic possession.
[Reply]
Elizabeth Reply:
October 9th, 2009 at 2:25 am
Has anyone really looked at this print? First MeAncholia is spelled wrong-it’s spelled as MelEncholia, which could have been easily fixed when Durer changed the backwards “9″ in the first state-Durer left it spelled wrong on purpose BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MEAN melancholia-it’s a latin coded inscription from greek.
Funny how no one decided to identify the DOG in the print-it’s a Hungarian Agar-only used by nobles.
Ever notice the little child is a GIRL?
This print has NOTHING to do with futility or melancholy or mathematics. It’s a tribute picture to two very important people in his life-the rhomboid has 18 vertices and there were 18 Durer children. It’s next to a goldsmith’s brazier-Durer’s father was a goldsmith. The symbols have been misidentified
Anyone catching the drift of this?
[Reply]
Yeah, I know that!
Melancholia and the infinite sadness,
the kind of deep state o mind that makes u feel so close to death,
and even that gives u great energy to creat and turn this feeling into what u can call HE-art.
It’s awful nice as life can be sometimes.
It’s also very mysterious, it happens and then disappears.
I think its important to know about what our heart gives us.
Even if it’s not a feeling that makes u good, at least u feel and your heart beats then U R ALIVE!
and it’s good to be alive;)
is it? :D
Love
Damien
[Reply]
This is PERFECT!
Right on the dot.
Digging deeper into the quagmire, weighed down by a cross only you can see…every effort to break free pulling you deeper.
[Reply]
Didn´t anybody see the lamb???
I do…
;-))
Nia
[Reply]
I often associate myself with this word, more often then not.
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The keys and purse of the Angel are apparently the only elements in the engraving whose
meaning has been left us by D¨urer. They stand for power and wealth. But while his
Madonna and his Venus wear their purses and keys at the waist, the Angel drags her purse
on the ground. This difference calls for interpretation. Likely it means that theology is
profaned by fiscal power, for D¨urer was a passionate critic of clerical corruption
[Reply]
We must turn the engraving about 60 counterclockwise to see First Fool best and
then he looks to our right. His nose forms part of the bottom edge of the Angel’s robe. He
has a mustache.
A powerful winged housewife with a fool in her hem is not a standard symbol, but D¨urer
helpfully used it twice. In the woodcut Von Buolschafft (On Amours) attributed to D¨urer,
the winged housewife is Venus, the goddess of the fools of love, the most common variety
of fool according to Brant ([2], Chapter 13, On Amours (Von Buolschaft)). Venus’s wings
are those of an eagle signifying fame, not those of an angel signifying divinity. We know
she is a housewife because Brant calls her sarcastically “Frau Venus.” “Frau” is evidently
no term of respect for D¨urer or Brant. The caricature in her hem is so crude that I hoped
it was accidental, but since it recurs, these fools-in-winged-housewives’-hems are probably
not accidents but part of D¨urer’s graphic language.
Evidently the Angel is also presented as a housewife, not in so many words but by her
purse, keys, and what seems to be a spindle dangling down her dress from her left knee.
The Madonna by the Wall (D¨urer 1514) also wears the keys and purse of a housewife. D¨urer
seems to say that the Theological Philosopher too attracts fools. This echoes and amplifies
doctrines already expressed by Nicholas of Cusa[27] and Erasmus[9]and later written down
by Agrippa [1].
The quaternities of the Prophets and of the Ghosts are also in the theological realm.
It is not clear at this point whether D¨urer means quaternity to imply divinity. First Fool
provides a useful litmus indicator for this. If the Fool is a quadruple fool then likely D¨urer
does not reserve quaternity for the divine. So I looked for other Fools.
• It is then easy to see the larger face of Second Fool looking slightly to our left. Second
Fool has curled hair that suggests a woman.
• Third Fool is looking upward and to our left. Unlike First Fool and Second Fool,
Third Fool has a body, a complete arm with a mitten-like hand at his side, a leg, and the
purse of the Angel.
This set me to search for ambiguous trinities in the Intellectual World and to find Third
Ghost, already mentioned. But in fact there are four Fools.
• Fourth Fool stands upright to the left of the others, wearing a robe from head to
ground, looking almost right at us.
[Reply]
The matrix of numbers set into the masonry wall in MELENCOLIA I like a window lattice
is a magic square, meaning that it is filled with consecutive numbers starting from 1 and
every row, every column, and both main diagonals add up to the same number. In a 4 × 4
magic square that number must be one quarter the sum of the integers from 1 to 16, which
is 34. This magic square is a gnomon magic square. This means that in addition its four
quadrants, its four corners, and its central tetrad add up to the same number. Usually a
gnomon means a pointer or indicator, especially of a sundial. A carpenter’s square was also
called a gnomon, perhaps because it looks like a crude picture of a pointing hand. This
kind of magic square is called a gnomon, I suppose, because removing a quadrant leaves
a figure that resembles a carpenter’s square. In addition, the sum of any pair of numbers
symmetric about the center of this square is 17.
[Reply]
MELENCOLIA I.1
David Ritz Finkelstein
c 2007
January 10, 2007
1
Figure 1: MELENCOLIA I.0, A. D¨urer, 1514
2
[Reply]
All the symbols I have found in MELENCOLIA I can be assigned naturally to one of
the three Worlds of the Agrippan cosmology which follow, except Agrippa, who walks them
all in his writings. I therefore take him up before the elements of the three Worlds.
Ficino and Agrippa also kept the ancient Greek psychology of the four humors, one
for each Element: blood for Air and the sanguinary temperament, yellow bile or choler for
Fire and the bilious temperament, phlegm for Water and the phlegmatic temperament, and
black bile or melan cholia for Earth and acute depression. This theory occupied D¨urer’s
imagination in 1514 [28]. It too survives today, in our vocabulary for temperaments.
Melancholia, the black bile, is a Greek myth, invented to fit the mental illness of acute
depression into humor theory. Sometimes it pays to postulate previously unseen entities;
we found Uranus and the neutrino that way. Sometimes it doesn’t; there isn’t any black
bile. Some said the appendix secreted it, some the spleen. Neither secrete anything.
Astrologers had associated Saturn, the slowest and darkest planet, with the darkest
temperament, melancholia; with the lowest Element, Earth; and with the lowest people,
taken to be those who work on or in the earth. Agrippa promoted Saturn from the lowest
status among the planets to the highest, arguing that Saturn is highest from the Sun and
most sedate of all. He attributed to Saturn the power to inspire all three Faculties to their
peak creativity, and transferred the demi-godlike geometers — “earth measurers,” after all
— to the control of Saturn, with the farmers and miners. According to Agrippa, Saturn
could inspire the Imaginative Faculty of the artist with a form of melancholia that appears
as a creative frenzy or furor. Agrippa also wrote a tract on the natural superiority of women
over men.
[Reply]
His life mission seems to have been to sanctify art above artisanry and even above
philosophy; to give graphic art the holiness then attributed to music, geometry, arithmetic,
and astrology, the medieval quadrivium. Number and measurement lifted these from the
mundane into the divine, so Leonardo, D¨urer, and others sought to found art and beauty
too on number and measurement. The concept of the Golden Rectangle, Leonardo’s famous
drawing of a man inscribed in a circle, and D¨urer’s books on descriptive geometry and body
proportions are mementos of that quest. So is much of MELENCOLIA I.
D¨urer was a Humanist, knowledgeable in mathematics, poetry, and antiquity as well as
art. He argued philosophy hotly and on equal terms with a famous scholar like Pirckheimer,
and conversed with Erasmus. He passionately criticized corrupt ecclesiastical practices and
supported the Reformation.
[Reply]
D¨urer was also the first to publish in German a mathematical proof or a book on
pure mathematics. He produced the first printed map of the world as a sphere viewed
from space, and the first printed star-chart, which was a sphere viewed from inside. He
shaped the German scientific language much as Leonardo did the Italian: by using the
ordinary language instead of flowery Latin, ruthlessly cutting out the prose ornamentation
and classical erudition that pervaded scholarly writing in his time.
He was a brilliant and recognized originator in art too. He made the first known selfportrait
and the first known specific landscape. He invented etching and perspective drawing
machines.
[Reply]
The rainbow, seen in the background, was the alchemist’s favorite symbol for the colors that were held to appear, in a definite sequence culminating in red (within the Vase of Hermes) during the operations of the Great Work or in the preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone. The magic square, the compasses, the polyhedron and sphere, all reflect the Pythagorean insistence on the importance of number and form in the Cosmos. The Pythagorean and Platonic conceptions formed an important constituent of alchemical doctrine; further, the compasses, the balance, and the hour-glass, with its graduated scale, are suggestive of a common alchemical dictum, borrowed from The Wisdom of Solomon: ” Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.”
The alchemical significance of the crucible requires no explanation, for this most familiar of all pieces of alchemical apparatus was to be found in every alchemist’s laboratory, den, or kitchen. The most familiar agent used by the alchemists in their operations was fire; so much so, that the alchemist was often called the “Child of Fire.” Fire was commonly symbolized by cutting, penetrating, or wounding implements and tools, like the saw and plane and the hammer and nails of Durer’s design. The alchemical imagination embodied archetypal Fire in another form as Sophic Sulfur, one of the two final ingredients of the Philosopher’s Stone, and occasionally shown in the similitude of a dog.
The second ingredient, Sophic Mercury, was sometimes represented by Water ; that is to say, “our Water” of the Hermetic Stream (or heavy water, not wetting the hands). Alternatively, this philosophical Water was regarded as a menstruum uniting Sophic Sulfur and Sophic Mercury. Occasionally, the seeker after the Stone is shown balancing the opposed elements, Fire and Water, in a pair of scales, and at one time it was imagined that, in alcohol, such a combination of irreconcilable principles had been achieved.
The seven-runged ladder is another common feature of alchemical symbolism, the rungs representing the seven metals, the operations of alchemy, and the associated heavenly bodies. One of the paintings of Splendor Solis (1582), for example, shows a man standing on the sixth and seventh rungs (representing silver and gold) and gathering the golden fruit of the Philosophic Tree, from the roots of which issues the Hermetic Stream. In the later Mutus Liber a young man, using a stone for his pillow, is shown asleep at the foot of a ladder bearing ascending and descending angels; this stone, upon which the biblical Jacob poured oil, was sometimes accepted as a symbol of the Philosopher’s Stone.
We now come to the central theme of Durer’s “Melencolia.” The alchemist’s lot was such that he was often depicted as a melancholy and frustrated being, as, for example, by Chaucer, Weiditz, Brueghel, and Teniers. In a wider sense, melancholy was held to be an attribute of students or seekers after knowledge. The doctrine of melancholy, moreover, is inseparable from the Saturnine mysticism that permeates alchemy. This association, which was widely recognized in the early sixteenth century, finds many reflections in Durer’s masterpiece. One of the elements of Saturnine mysticism is measurement, typified by the compasses, balance, and hour-glass.
The polyhedron lying beside the foot of the ladder (representing the base metal, lead) may be an image of the Philosopher’s Stone, or more immediately, of the so-called ” Stone of Saturn,” which Saturn (or Kronos), “swallowed and spewed up instead of Jupiter.” Saturn, who is often represented in alchemy as an old man with an hour-glass upon his head, was addicted to swallowing his own children; for this reason, infants, usually shown at play, enter into the Saturnine elements of alchemy.
It is frequently stated in the esoteric writings on alchemy that once the primitive materials of the Stone have been obtained, the rest of the operations of the Great Work are only a labor fit for women or “child’s play.” This ludus puerorum (child’s play) motive often comes to the surface in sixteenth century art, as, for example, in the work of Durer’s contemporary, Cranach. The infants may be linked on the one hand with the alchemical idea of regeneration, and on the other with the mythological story of Saturn and thus with the idea of melancholy.
[Reply]
One of Durer’s masterpieces, the engraving Melancholia I, features a frustrated thinker sitting by an uncommon polyhedron. (Click the image for a larger version.) Much has been written analyzing the symbolism in the image and the possible meaning of every element including the polyhedron. One might speculate that the cube represents masculinity and truncating one in an upright position may have some Freudean symbolism.
Geometrically, the polyhedron is simply a cube or rhombohedron which has been truncated at the upper vertex. (I can not decide if the lower vertex is also truncated so the solid rests on a triangular face, or if the lower vertex symbolically penetrates the earth, but no other writers seem to allow for that possibility.) Panofsky accurately describes it simply as a “truncated rhomboid.” It is possible to proportion it so that the vertices project onto a 4-by-4 square grid like that of the magic square (see the papers by Lynch and Sharp). Schreiber proposes that it comes from a rhombohedron with 72-degree face angles, which has been truncated so it can be inscribed in a sphere. This polyhedron continues to sire a considerable literature, so for those who wish to read some of what has been written about it, here are a few references to get you started:
P. J. Federico, “The Melancholy Octahedron,” Mathematics Magazine, pp. 30-36, 1972.
T. Lynch, “The geometric body in Durer’s engraving Melancholia I,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Inst., pp. 226-232, 1982.
C. H. MacGillavry, “The Polyhedron in A. Durer’s ‘Melancolia I’: An Over 450 Years Old Puzzle Solved ?” Netherland Akad Wetensch. Proc., 1981.
E. Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer, Princeton, 1955.
P. Schreiber, “A New Hypothesis on Durer’s Enigmatic Polyhedron in His Copper Engraving ‘Melencholia I’,” Historia Mathematica, 26, pp. 369-377, 1999.
K. D. Walton, “Albrecht Durer’s Renaissance Connections Between Mathematics and Art,” The Mathematics Teacher, pp. 278-282, 1994.
J. Sharp, “Durer’s Melancholy Octahedron,” Mathematics in School, Sept. 1994, pp. 18-20.
[Reply]
Johanna (8) comments: “O God, what happened there? Even the putto is pouting!”
[Reply]
I just decided to change it into a smile…
When this is a self-portrait of Dürer I can say that even with his melancholia he is a beautiful rainbow.
Love
All ways
Hildegarde
[Reply]
Bajo el símbolo del equilibrio, el ascenso, la justicia, el tiempo medio dando la salida y escribiendo un nombre algo se constrirá, falta la inspiración y la llave la tiene el Angel que Aguarda.
Un beso Paulo.
[Reply]
I used to be associated with this word (beautifully depicted in this marvelous Dürer) fortunately I’m not anymore ;)
I once told a good friend that I did not understand why I felt the need to cry so often, and the answer that returned was, “because my soul is searching for the light”!….
Love, & never give up searching, Paul
[Reply]
We go through our lives..
hoping..
love won’t change..
its meaning..
we listen to the waves..
of the dark sea..
believing..
we won’t drown…
when we lose…
the wing..
we pray to see the world..
in pink glasses..
afraid…of..
something..
anything..
everything..
love
Agnieszka
[Reply]
it is one of the greatest drawings i have ever seen in my life…so many messages hidden underneath..Mostly depicts the creative melancholy of an artist..
In the background there is engraved Melencolia I, which is one of the 3 types om melencolia, Melencolia Imaginative…
Every creative nature i believe has such an imagination that can surpass mind and logic (maybe that is why there are the unused tools of geometry that surround him..)
There is an hourglass also, letting time pass by,a scale, and there is a comet and the rainbow in the sky in the background, maybe because all his imagination is like a comet in this world he lives in and the rainbow lets shine another invisible world..
Also , there is a genius (in the roman mythology men had a genius and women a juno, which is somthing like the guardian angel..
if i can recall, Picasso was a great admirer of Dürer..i can definitely understand that!!
Oh, and there is this magic square, which if i remember correctly has the sum of the name of this work, Albrecht Durer..
Love and Graditude
Annie
[Reply]
Melancholy; some say that people endowed with great talent and creativity (artists, musicians, scholars, philosophers, etc..) have a melancholy temperament because of the idealistic character that make them vulnerable to humanistic philosophy; philosophy that appeals to intellect but is far from God.
So I would say:
angel that has lost the meaning of life because he strayed away from God.
love
Agnieszka
[Reply]
wonderful,beautiful,cool :)
[Reply]